by Brian Doyle
Afterword
The reader who is interested in the life and work of the remarkable Robert Louis Stevenson (and who would not be absorbed by such a riveting and gracious soul?) can plunge happily into all sorts of excellent biographies, studies, and books by RLS; beyond his four masterpieces (the novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Jekyll and Hyde, and the irresistible charm of A Child’s Garden of Verses), I particularly recommend his later essays (my favorite is a collection called The Lantern-Bearers & Other Essays), his great book of horror stories The Merry Men, his South Seas novella The Beach of Falesa, and his half-finished final novel Weir of Hermiston, which I think might have been a fifth masterpiece, had he lived to complete it; he died on the evening of December 3, 1894, of stroke, after dictating some of Weir to Fanny’s daughter Isobel, whom he loved as his own child. He was only forty-four years old, poor soul. Fifth masterpiece, by the way, is an amazing phrase—few human beings are allowed to write one masterpiece, let alone four and a half. My favorite biography of him is his cousin Graham Balfour’s Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, and a perceptive modern profile is Philip Callow’s Louis. But I might suggest that you will find more of the man in books by him than about him; dip into Kidnapped again, or read Treasure Island for the first time since you were a youth, and there is the man, cheerful and dashing and eloquent and delighted to be alive and telling stories.
It is probably worth noting here that his plays, and his novels written with his stepson Lloyd, are not very good, which makes me like him all the more; for one thing, he devoted many hours to writing books with his stepson, which is a cool and generous thing to do with your time if you are a genius, and shows us his character, and also it’s refreshing that he was not great at everything; if he was a master of all literary forms we would dislike him a little, I suspect, from envious awe.
The basic facts in the previous pages are true: Stevenson did indeed live with the Carsons on Bush Street, from December 1879 to late March or early April of 1880 (the plaque on Bush Street today, commemorating his residence there, claims that he left in March, but I find no evidence that he did so, and have preferred to leave him with the Carsons until his wedding day), and he and Fanny did marry on May 19, in San Francisco, at the home of the Reverend Doctor William Anderson Scott, a Presbyterian minister. Their friend Dora Williams suggested to the newlyweds that they honeymoon in the hills above Napa, an experience that led to Stevenson’s delightful honeymoon memoir The Silverado Squatters. I have happily placed John and Mary Carson at the wedding, because how could they possibly not be there, and who now is to say they were not?
John Carson’s friend Alfred Russel Wallace was indeed a world-famous scientist and veteran of the jungles of Borneo. Wallace conceived the theory of natural selection wholly independently of Charles Darwin, and in fact Wallace’s artless letter to Darwin about his thoughts led directly to Darwin hurriedly finishing and publishing his epic The Evolution of Species for fear that he would be trumped as to the origins of his remarkable perceptions. That the two men became good friends of great mutual esteem is a compliment to their great generosity of spirit. Wallace was also a fine writer (he is much more fun to read than Darwin, I think), and I relish, and have much leaned on here, his great book The Malay Archipelago.
The Catholic priest who served with John Carson in the War Between the States was also a real and fascinating man: the Reverend William Corby, of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the order affiliated most famously in America with the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. Corby did serve with the famous Irish Brigade (Sixty-ninth New York Infantry, whose battle roar was fág an bealach, Gaelic for “clear the way”), did famously stand on a rock at Gettysburg before the slaughter in the wheat field, and did offer absolution to the men (he said later that the prayer was meant for men on both sides, not just the North), and surely he must have wept in horror at the ensuing carnage. He was later twice named president of the University of Notre Dame, and there are statues commemorating his extraordinary moment on the rock both at Gettysburg and at Notre Dame, which also named its priests’ residence hall for him. Readers particularly interested in the history of the Irish Brigade ought to read Tim Egan’s terrific The Immortal Irishman, and after that read Egan’s other books, particularly The Worst Hard Time. That man is a fine writer and no mistake.
The small intense man in Montreal who was so kind to Mary Carson in her flight across Canada was also quite real, and also a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross: he is now called Saint Andre Bessette, after his canonization in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI. An altogether fascinating man, he was by many accounts grumpy, testy, tiny, illiterate, rude—and legendarily credited with hundreds of miraculous cures effected through his intercession, especially with Saint Joseph. Brother Andre (he was not a priest) himself constantly and rudely refused credit for the efficacy of his prayers. “Ite ad Joseph!” he would snarl at those who asked for his help, and by some accounts he would then slam his door in their faces. Yet he apparently spent many hours a day in prayer, he was the irrefutable force who led to Saint Joseph’s Oratory being built on Mount Royal, and he is still, long after his death in 1937, credited with miracles; witness the room filled with abandoned crutches and canes today at the oratory.
Robert Louis Stevenson did indeed have a friend named Captain Anson Smith, who did run a goat ranch in Carmel, and was a bear hunter; Colonel John Fremont’s troops in the Bear Flag revolt and the later war against Mexico for California were so ragtag (and Fremont such a greedy schemer wholly disinterested in channels of authority and organization) that no one knows if Smith was formally a captain or not; but Stevenson called him one, and so we will take that as gospel.
The abandoned stone village on Sliabh Mór on Achill Island, the Island of the Eagles, is quite real, and still there, and I have seen it, and it is still, to my mind, haunted and extraordinary and sad. My particular thanks here to my dear friend Michael Patrick Mulcrone of County Mayo, who brought me to Achill and showed me much of that holy and mysterious Irish island, from which, I note happily, the ancestors of the terrific American novelist Alice McDermott came. More homework: read McDermott’s Irish American masterpieces Charming Billy and Someone.
The ship Duke of Sutherland arrived in Sydney Harbor on February 4, 1879, after a voyage from London; listed among the four “ordinary seamen,” the lowest ranking aboard, was a very young Conrad de Korzeniowski, better known later by his pen name Joseph Conrad. I have leaned a bit on Conrad’s memoirs, The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record, for the flavor and tenor of his talk, and also, of course, like any sensible reader, swum thoroughly in his novels. Conrad may well be the one writer I know who never wrote a lesser novel. I love his sea novels, but his land novels are superb. Remarkable man. Imagine becoming one of the greatest of writers in a language that is the third you learned; he grew up speaking Polish and French.
Mark Twain, still toggling back and forth between the names Sam Clemens and Mark Twain, did indeed live in San Francisco in 1865 and 1866, and did write hilariously about dogs and earthquakes and charlatans and mountebanks, and did indeed publish A Tramp Abroad in 1880, a very funny and perceptive book, which I assign to you as homework, right after you read his masterpieces The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Roughing It. (Huck Finn is almost a masterpiece, but Twain totally lost the narrative thread at the end, and the book slumps to a bedraggled conclusion; Twain himself clearly lost interest, and just wanted to be done with the thing, a great shame; a good editor could have saved that book, and it might today be in the discussion of Greatest American Novel Ever, with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.) Twain, by the way, apparently did not actually say “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” but it’s a great line, and if anyone would have said it, surely it would have been Twain. I note with fascination that Twain and Stevenson had the highest regard for each other’s work, and did finally meet each other, on a bench one April day in Washington
Square in New York City, where they spent hours in conversation; no one knows what they said (each man referred only briefly to their time together), but I, of course, being a Twain and Stevenson nut, happily tried to re-create the whole five hours; see “Sam and Louis” in the Summer 2014 issue of The Georgia Review.
The last line in the book is drawn from Robert Louis Stevenson himself, from the introduction to his charming book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, one of the first great travel books: “But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves.… Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?”
Stevenson’s closest friend (to whom he dedicated Travels with a Donkey) was Sidney Colvin, a literary critic of wit and perception and for many years the print and engravings curator at the British Museum; they met when Stevenson was twenty-two and were instantly the best of friends, remaining so until Stevenson’s death in 1894. “I have known no man,” wrote Colvin in 1896, “in whom the poet’s heart and imagination were combined with such a brilliant strain of humour and such an unsleeping alertness and adroitness of the critical intelligence.… His perceptions and emotions were acute and vivid in the extreme … to his ardent fancy the world was a theatre glowing with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance. To find for all he had to say words of vital aptness and animation—to communicate as much as possible of what he has somewhere called ‘the incommunicable thrill of things’—was from the first his endeavour in literature, [and] the main passion of his life.…”
Let us conclude there, with that eager amused energetic image of Robert Louis Stevenson in our minds; for this book is, in a real sense, a song of him and his spirit, and to the avid tender “thrill of things” that lives in every heart. Rest in peace, brother, on your Samoan mountain. Millions of us still read you, and I suspect you will be read with respect and affection and awe as long as there are human beings absorbed by story; which I hope will be forever.
Thanks & Notes
I leaned heavily and steadily on two books in particular, in recounting the adventures of John Carson: From Scotland to Silverado, by Robert Louis Stevenson, in an edition edited by James Hart, and The Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Ernest Mayhew, a thorough and deft distillation of what I think might be RLS at his very best, funny and tart-tongued and honest and genuine.
I also owe a debt to several writers and friends who, I have discovered with delight over the years, are also mad Stevenson fans, and join me in loving the verve and energy and depth of his work; their cheerful notes and encouragement were a great boon to me, and made me laugh, and in substantive ways made me think a book like this actually ought to be attempted by the least among us. So to America’s Cynthia Ozick, Australia’s Helen Garner, and the planet’s Pico Iyer, I bow in thanks.
While we are on the subject of great writers who love Stevenson’s work, it’s interesting to note how many of the world’s best writers esteemed Stevenson and thought him one of the finest writers ever: Mark Twain, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry James, G. K. Chesterton. If many of the finest writers past and present think a writer is one of the finest writers ever, could he be one of the finest writers ever? Just asking.
I also leaned on a number of other helpful books: Ross Slotten’s fine biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court; Wallace’s own terrific The Malay Archipelago, first published in 1869; Old Achill Island, by Hugh Oram; Achill Island: The Deserted Village at Slievemore, by Bob Kingston; An Irish Country Childhood, by Marrie Walsh; and San Francisco Bay, by Harold Gilliam.
Also I must here thank the genius Joseph Conrad; not only do I love and regularly swim again in the best of his work, but surely much of the pleasure of imagining John Carson’s voice unspooling stories from his shadowy corner near the fire was born forty years ago when I first savored (in a glorious edition called A Conrad Argosy) how Conrad’s sailor Charles Marlow narrates Lord Jim, Chance, Heart of Darkness, and the terrific story “Youth.” For your homework assignment tomorrow, read “Youth.” Conrad at his very best is mesmerizing.
My thanks also to Lee Brenneisen and Gerald Asher and Michael Miller, who have shown me much of their beloved San Francisco; to my friend Micheál Pádraic Mulcròin, who first brought me to Achill Island; and to the great Australian journalists James Button and Martin Flanagan, who have been most trustworthy sources of their country’s history and literature for me. And finally my quiet prayers for the soul of Harriette McDougall, whose honest gentle memoir of her years in Borneo taught me much of that place and that time. Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak, published in 1882 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London, is now available free on Project Gutenberg.
OTHER BOOKS BY BRIAN DOYLE
Novels
Chicago
Martin Marten
The Plover
Mink River
Cat’s Foot
Short Stories
The Mighty Currawongs & Other Stories
Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories
Poetry
How the Light Gets In
The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be
A Shimmer of Something
Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices
Epiphanies & Elegies
Nonfiction
The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir in the Whole Wild World
The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart
Essay Collections
So Very Much the Best of Us
Reading in Bed
A Book of Uncommon Prayer
Children & Other Wild Animals
The Thorny Grace of It
Leaping: Revelations & Epiphanies
Spirited Men
Saints Passionate & Peculiar
Credo
Two Voices (with Jim Doyle)
About the Author
BRIAN DOYLE is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of many books of essays, fiction, poems, and nonfiction, among them the novels Mink River, The Plover, Martin Marten, and Chicago. Honors for his work include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Oregon Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Preface
Epigraphs
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Afterword
Thanks & Notes
Other Books by Brian Doyle
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE ADVENTURES OF JOHN CARSON IN SEVERAL QUARTERS OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2017 by Brian Doyle. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Jeremy Fink
Cover photographs: paper © H. Peter / Alamy Stock Ph
oto; pen © Diogen / Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Doyle, Brian, 1956 November 6– author.
Title: The adventures of John Carson in several quarters of the world: a novel of Robert Louis Stevenson / Brian Doyle.
Description: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043274|ISBN 9781250100528 (hardback)|ISBN 9781250100535 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850–1894—Fiction.|Authors—Fiction.|San Francisco (Calif.)—Social life and customs—19th century—Fiction.|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|FICTION / Historical.|FICTION / Biographical.|GSAFD: Biographical fiction.|Adventure fiction.|Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3604.O9547 A63 2017|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043274
e-ISBN 9781250100535
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